Friendship and Mentorship Theme Analysis

Beth tried it, awkwardly at first. Jolene showed her again, laughing. Beth tried a few more times and did it better. Then Jolene got the ball and had Beth catch it with her fingertips. After a few times it got to be easy.

“You work on that now, hear?” Jolene said and ran off to the shower.

Beth worked on it over the next week, and after that she did not mind volleyball at all. She did not become good at it, but it wasn’t something she was afraid of anymore.

Mrs. Deardorff kept her waiting almost an hour. Beth didn’t care. She read in National Geographic about a tribe of Indians who lived in the holes of cliffs. Brown people with black hair and bad teeth. In the pictures there were children everywhere, often snuggled up against the older people. It was all strange; she had never been touched very much by older people, except for punishment. She did not let herself think about Mrs. Deardorff’s razor strop. If Deardorff was going to use it, she could take it. Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was of a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.

Some of them were books she had seen before; a few of them she owned. But most were new to her, heavy-looking and depressing to see. She knew there were a great many things she needed to know. But Capablanca had almost never studied, had played on intuition and his natural gifts, while inferior players like Bogolubov and Grünfeld memorized lines of play like German pedants. She had seen players at tournament after their games had ended, sitting motionless in uncomfortable chairs oblivious to the world, studying opening variations or middle-game strategy or endgame theory. It was endless. Seeing Beltik methodically removing one heavy book after another, she felt weary and disoriented. She glanced over at the TV: a part of her wanted to turn it on and forget chess forever.

“Do you want to play another?”

Benny shrugged and turned away. “Save it for Borgov.” But she could see he would have played her if he had thought he could win. She felt a whole lot better.

They continued as lovers and did not play any more games, except from the books. He went out a few days later for another poker game and came back with two hundred in winnings and they had one of their best times in bed together, with the money beside them on the night table. She was fond of him, but that was all. And by the last week before Paris, she was beginning to feel that he had little left to teach her.

She sat at the board and wished for a moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess. Most people did.

Beth thought about it. There were bottles of red wine and white in the cabinet behind her, and for a moment she became impatient for Jolene to leave so that she could get one out and twist the cork off and pour herself a full glass. She could feel the sensation of it at the back of her throat.

[…]

“You’ve got to get your ass moving, girl,” Jolene said. “You got to quit sitting in your own funk.”

“Okay,” Beth said. “I’ll be there.”

When Jolene left, Beth had one glass of wine but not a second. She opened up all the windows in the house and drank the wine out in the backyard, with the moon, nearly full, directly above the little shed at the back. There was a cool breeze. She took a long time over the drink, letting the breeze blow into the kitchen window, fluttering the curtains, blowing through the kitchen and living room, clearing out the air inside.

No matter how often she told herself she was as good as any of them, she felt with dismay that those men with their heavy black shoes knew something she did not know and never would know. She tried to concentrate on her own career, her quick rise to the top of American chess and beyond it, the way she had become a more powerful player than Benny Watts, the way she had beaten Laev without a moment of doubt in her moves, the way that, even as a child, she had found an error in the play of the great Morphy. But all of it was meaningless and trivial beside her glimpse into the establishment of Russian chess, into the room where the men conferred in deep voices and studied the board with an assurance that seemed wholly beyond her.

They went on together, exploring possibilities, following out line after line, for almost an hour. Benny was amazing. He had worked out everything; she began to see ways of crowding Borgov, finessing Borgov, deceiving him, tying up his pieces, forcing him to compromise and retreat.

Finally she looked at her watch and said, “Benny, it’s nine-fifteen here.”

“Okay,” he said. “Go beat him.”

The applause began. She took the black king in her hand and turned to face the auditorium, letting the whole massive weight of the ovation wash over her. People in the audience were standing, applauding louder and louder. She received it with her whole body, feeling her cheeks redden with it and then go hot and wet as the thunderous sound washed away thought.

And then Vasily Borgov was standing beside her, and a moment later to her complete astonishment he had his arms spread and then was embracing her, hugging her to him warmly.